Back in December, we conducted our first “Role Satisfaction Survey”. The purpose was to find out what categories of abilities and items needed to be reworked the soonest. We worked to improve in our worst areas, and in January we conducted a second, similar survey. In this dev blog, I explore the feedback we gathered, and how we evolved Revn between the surveys.
Roles in other MOBAs
First, a look at what types of players filled out the survey. We asked if participants played other MOBA type games, and what their main position was in those MOBAs (jungler, support, top, ADC, etc). In December, 25% of players did not play other MOBAs. However, in January 46% of players did not play other MOBAs.
Player Roles in Revn
Next, I looked at the popularity of roles in Revn. Weapons Specialist (DPS) continues to be our most popular role, at 38.5%. Engineers (23.1%) and Junglers (23.1%) are also pretty common. This makes sense, because Weapons Specialist is probably the simplest role to learn and master. Meanwhile, Engineers and Junglers are crucial to winning a match in Revn.
Satisfaction with Abilities
Finally, we asked players to rate each role’s abilities from 1 to 5, with 1 being very unhappy, and 5 being very happy with the state of the abilities available to that role. By design, this question is pretty broad, because there can be dozens of abilities used by any given role. At this stage in development, we aren’t ready to focus on balancing any single ability. Rather, we want to create a variety of options for each role, and create an overall sense of satisfaction with each role, before working too much on any given ability.
As you can see, we’ve improved player satisfaction in every category except for Mobility. Mobility had lots of neutral opinions in December, but now most players have strong positive or negative opinions on this category. Between the surveys, we reworked the Jump Jet ability, and it became extremely popular among Jungler and DPS players. This is forcing us to update the map to allow all players to access vertical elements of the world via staircases and catwalks. I’m also really excited to add more mobility abilities such as grappling hooks in the future.
We had an optional section of the survey for players to provide written suggestions and comments. Some of these pointed out that there aren’t a lot of options available to DPS / Weapons Specialist players, so I’m going to make sure we design more in the near future.
And that’s it for this Dev Blog! We’ve sent emails with reward codes for 500 Shards to every player who participated in the January survey. We’ll have more surveys in the future, so keep an eye on our Twitter and Instagram pages.
-Silas, Creative Director @ Project Ambitious Games
